#68 Circadian Rhythms and Sleep Optimization at the Biohacking Bootcamp

Siim Land (0:03)

Hey, Siim here, and in this special episode of the Body Mind Empowerment Podcast, I'm going to share with you one of the workshops from my biohacking bootcamp that I did in July. So it's going to be about the circadian rhythms, how to optimize it, how to have better sleep, and how to align yourself with the natural day and night cycles of your environment and your physiology. So check it out, it's going to be quite an awesome episode. Also, I'm going to tell you that if you want to get access to the rest of the workshops that I did in the biohacking bootcamp, then you can join my Patreon and you can start pledging some funds into the account and support the podcast this way. But other than that, enjoy this episode about circadian rhythms, sleep, and body mind empowerment.

SPEAKER_2 (0:51)

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Siim Land (0:57)

Everything the body needs.

SPEAKER_2 (0:59)

Control your mind.

Siim Land (1:04)

And also like this circadian rhythms, they're also quite quite new. They were kind of discovered or like quite scientifically proven or approved in 2017 when the scientists Jeffrey Hall, Michael Rostash and Michael Young, they won the 2017 Nobel Prize for this discoveries about the biological clocks and circadian rhythms. So it's quite new.

Quite a lot of things to learn about it. We don't know much, but we still know something.

SPEAKER_3 (1:41)

So what are circadian rhythms?

Siim Land (1:43)

Circadian rhythms are these biological rhythms that are connected with your environment. There's this biological clocks inside your brain and they're going to have basically a lot of impact. They're going to control your metabolism, your physiology, your behavior, your mood and basically all the other entire or your entire body is connected with the biological clock in your head with your environment. So the center of it is actually called the suprachiasmatic nucleus or SCN. That's where the clock is. It's near the pineal gland and the way your brain communicates with the environment is through the light, the light that can come in from the retinas in your eyes or even potentially like the skin is probably some sort of a signaling vehicle. Your light can detect it on the skin, your ear canals, your mouth maybe.

But most of it happens through the retinas in your eyes.

So the circadian rhythms, they're going to control basically everything else inside your body, like your sleep, your day and night's wakefulness, your attention span, your concentration. And hormones are definitely committed to that. Your nervous system, your core temperature fluctuates throughout the day, your feeling patterns, and even on the cellular level as well, like apoptosis, DNA repair. And the way you process food, and also like these pathways like autophagy, all those things are also connected to those circadian rhythms.

And this is a good example of how a mismatch in circadian rhythms is quite detrimental for you. And disruption in circadian rhythms tends to offset a lot of the anabolic and catabolic processes during the day. And for instance, like these hormones like cortisol and melatonin, they're either supporting your body's growth or they're breaking down, causing stress. And disruption in circadian rhythms is kind of potentially offset this balance of you're going to spend too much time being in the catabolic state where you're breaking down tissue or damaging your cells without giving your time to recover. So that's one of the biggest problems of mismatching our modern environment with the circadian rhythms of our being constantly in this catabolic mode. Even at nighttime, like the light stimulus is going to make us more stressed out and cause damage to the cells.

And an optimal circadian rhythm is also good for longevity and definitely this pathway called autophagy is linked with it. Autophagy is this cellular pathway that enables the healthy cells to break down the old worn out cells and convert them back into energy. And your body is always in a constant state of flux between building and growing. And a lot of the processes happen inside yourself where the mitochondria and different organelles are selectively replacing the weak cells and repairing them and building them back into new. So if you experience a disruption in circadian rhythms, if you have dysfunctional autophagy pathways as well, then you can simply accumulate a lot of the waste and toxins without without putting them back into good use.

So your cells and mitochondria will be less efficient and they will age faster as a result of that.

And a lot of studies have also shown that disruptions in circadian rhythms are connected to all types of these modern diseases, like inflammation, overweight, obviously insomnia, ADD, low moods, depression, anxiety, poor memory, learning. And definitely it's a very huge issue, especially as we're starting to become more dependent of technology. Like even just in my own experience or even in my own childhood, we didn't spend like we didn't spend time being awake after midnight and doing being looking at the smartphones and watching TV and stuff like that. And even even there's been like a small shift, I would say, over the last 10 years or something where people are constantly exposed to blue light all the time. And the effects, long term effects on the health are going to just start to emerge. We're probably going to have like a huge wave of people with depression, bipolar disorder and other like psychological conditions as well, like in the coming few years because of the effect of it has on our chronobiology. I can't sleep. Shift work is probably one of the worst things you can never do to your health. And a lot of shift workers, they have higher risk of cardiovascular disease, higher rates of, you know, all types of poor biological markers. And yeah, definitely it comes to show that the circadian rhythms are actually like more dangerous for your health based on the way it affects your entire metabolic pathways. And you can, you know, you can be eating a bad diet while still staying relatively healthy. But if you are constantly out of sync with the environment, or if you don't have access to recover from your daily activities, then you can't run away from that for too long. And if you do have a shift work, then you better get a better job, because it's not looking too good for you in the future.